Howdy everyone. Before we get into it… we finally did it.
A lot of you have been asking for a while: Can you make the site better?
So we took it down to the studs and rebuilt from scratch. We were aiming for something that’s sleek, beautiful, functional, and easy to navigate. I think the team (S/O Joy & Branden) knocked it out of the park.
If you’ve never been to our website… now’s the time! Keep reading, take a peek, poke around, and stay a while.
IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:
⚡ SpaceX’s solar play
💻 Our new website, live (!)
💸 Your vote: SpaceX at $1.75T?
🏰 Arctic retooling, gigascale, & an oncology breakthrough
🤝 Meet Dan Goldin @ Reindustrialize
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For a town few could place on a map, Bastrop, Texas has long had a habit of being present at the creation. According to local legend, a son of Bastrop fired the first shot of the Texas Revolution; another was the first to fall, and three were signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence. The gas station from 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre still stands just outside town, these days serving tourists brisket.
Despite the lore, and its moniker as “Most Historic Small Town in Texas,” Bastrop has become a place of new industrial beginnings. Situated ~25 mi from Austin-Bergstrom International, it has fast consolidated into the densest cluster of Elon Inc, with tunnel-boring robots, North America’s largest PCB facility, giga-scale EV manufacturing just over the county line, and a rising company town called Snailbrook. (90 miles northeast, in Grimes County, SpaceX and Tesla aim to achieve the impossible with the $55B Terafab project.)
New neighbor
The latest addition to the Bastrop Mega-Complex is a ~2M sq ft solar cell factory, co-located with the Starlink campus, per recent county paperwork spotted by Bloomberg. The permit application details a two-story beast, with a pair of 1M sq ft fabrication decks dedicated entirely to space-grade silicon. Each floor is engineered to crank out 5 GW at full tilt, yielding a total touted capacity of 10 GW a year. SpaceX is targeting initial production lines this year.
A quick aside/prediction… SpaceX will bypass the ERCOT grid interconnection queue for this facility, relying instead on massive on-site generation and heavy battery buffering.
They’re going for it (!)
ICYMI… As Jeff and Ryan have previously discussed, SpaceX is internalizing solar production because:
Vertical integration runs in its veins
China’s tightening grip on the cell supply chain
A legacy, low-volume oligopolistic vendor base simply cannot supply the raw wattage required for Starlink and future space datacenters.
To pull this off, SpaceX had to break the fundamental design canon of aerospace engineering: using gallium arsenide (GaAs) for solar arrays. SpaceX swapped GaAs for silicon years ago when designing the Starlink constellation, recognizing that, among other things, the legacy material is a unit-economic dead end for megaconstellations.
This is a big deal in our eyes because it 1) singularly represents a massive, orders-of-magnitude step-up in global space solar cell capacity, and 2) proves that SpaceX is entirely serious about the endgame (take the dang datacenter and put it in space).
There’s a bigger story here — on the existing technology, physics, geopolitics, and unit economics of space power — that explains why SpaceX is plowing a chunk of its upcoming IPO proceeds into this new factory. For the definitive read on SpaceX’s gigawatts-in-space ambitions, the reshoring (and scaleup) of space solar manufacturing, and the perovskite endgame, dive into Space Power from PA № 043 (10 weeks ago) 👇️
Y’all have been asking for a new website for a minute now, so here’s the big unveil!
More to come here soon, folks.
🙏 Special thank you to the following, who provided a few words on Per Aspera (see site). We specifically asked these folks, because they are not just friends of the community, but they’re also this era’s leaders who, long before we even stood up PA, were getting their hands dirty — true builders in the arena with the dust, sweat, blood, and all:
Barbara Humpton, CEO of USA Rare Earths
Jordan Blashek, GP of Overture Ventures + Cofounder of Endless Frontiers
Andy Lapsa, CEO and Cofounder of Stoke Space
OUR ASK. It’s time to grow the tribe. Share with those — workmates, friends, family — who believe the next American Century will be won by DOING. HARD. THINGS.
Last week we asked you all following the SpaceX IPO saga, if you would — at the reported target valuation of ~$1.75T — be a buyer or not.
👇 Here’s how you all voted:
Today, SpaceX CFO Bret Johnsen laid out the IPO pitch in their roadshow video. Companies typically don’t share these publicly during the IPO process! But hey, SpaceX has been the exception at every step. Worth a watch!
001 / RETOOLING FOR THE HIGH NORTH. Davie Defense has broken ground on a $1B modernization of the Gulf Copper yards in Galveston and Port Arthur, which will support construction of three of the five ice-breaking Arctic Security Cutters that the Coast Guard has ordered for $3.5B. And we are (sadly) badly behind here — the U.S. sails just three icebreakers to Russia’s 40+, only one of them heavy (the 50-year-old Polar Star), and we haven’t built a heavy one since the ‘70s, all while a changing Arctic has opened up the region to shipping, competition, and adversary navies.
Gulf Copper has cut and welded steel for offshore oil rigs since 1948. Davie bought it in December to redirect that heavy-marine capacity, tools, and tribal knowledge into naval construction and complex government work.
You’ll see this elsewhere, too: Hanwha is retooling its LNG-carrier playbook for naval block construction in Philadelphia, while Saronic, which — literally — shipped its first Marauder four days ago, in under a year (!) — acquired Gulf Craft in April 2025 to pull more small-shipbuilding talent and facilities under one roof.
Congrats, Saronic team!
Solving America’s shipbuilding problem does not mean starting from zero. The more promising path is creative reuse: take workforces already fluent in an adjacent domain, re-aim the yard at warship and auxiliary hulls, and compound the faster, better, cheaper advantages across ports and programs. (BTW… In his 10 Challenges, Dan called out shipbuilding as a hard national problem that demands coordinated mobilization — and this kind of capability transfer, not just greenfield yards, is exactly the type of answer he had in mind.)
002 / +1 → THE GREAT MIGRATION. Mike Schroepfer, Meta's former CTO, has closed Gigascale Capital's first institutional fund of $250M, after already backing 25+ teams in the physical and clean-energy economy. He's the latest heavyweight making The Great Migration from the digital to physical economy:
At Meta, Schroepfer spent years scaling GWs of datacenter infrastructure and brought entirely new consumer hardware form factors to market. He reads climate and power through the same lens: as a deployment and cost problem. His thesis is that solar didn’t win because of green bona fides but because it got cheaper. As he put it: “The pattern is always the same: cost curves bend, markets scale, and a better alternative makes the old way obsolete. Climate impact is the result of better-performing systems”.
Today the bottleneck is everything besides the panel. Namely, getting everything around power built and connected. Some ~2,300 GW of zero-carbon generation and storage capacity — on the order of 1.5–2× the entire U.S. power fleet — is stuck waiting to connect to the grid, with the avg. project now sitting ~5 years in the interconnection queue and only ~20% ever making it to commercial operation. Gigascale’s focused on backing teams that can work within this reality and compress deployment — from transmission and transformers to permitting and physical AI. Godspeed, Schrep!
003 / WIN FOR 🇺🇸 MEDICINE… On May 31 in Chicago, more than 9,000 oncologists gave a rip-roaring standing ovation as Dr. Brian Wolpin presented survival curves in metastatic pancreatic cancer that almost no one expected to see in their careers. The data, which showed a ~2× improvement in survival, came from the global Phase 3 RASolute 302 trial of daraxonrasib, an oral, once-daily targeted therapy developed by U.S. biotech Revolution Medicines of Redwood City, CA.
Brian M. Wolpin, MD, MPH, Director of the Hale Family Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Daraxonrasib is a RAS(ON) inhibitor that targets RAS (“rat sarcoma”), the master growth‑control protein mutated in the vast majority of pancreatic tumors, by binding it in its active “ON” state and shutting down the relentless grow‑and‑divide signals that drive the disease.
In ~500 patients with previously treated metastatic pancreatic cancer, daraxonrasib roughly doubled survival versus standard chemotherapy: median overall survival reached 13.2 months on drug vs. 6.7 months on chemo, corresponding to a ~60% reduction in the risk of death, and progression‑free survival also nearly doubled.
Pancreatic cancer has been one of medicine’s true brick walls, with careers spent chasing weeks or months (and it has taken the life of a loved one of at least one member of the PA team). This is the hardest possible proof point for this new class of RAS(ON) inhibitors, and daraxonrasib — still technically investigational — is already being pushed into earlier‑line pancreatic disease and other RAS‑driven tumors, including lung and colorectal, where ongoing trials will show how far this effect can go.
A clean, massively hopeful break from decades of pancreatic fatalism, led by a homegrown U.S. biotech. A win for 🇺🇸 medicine.
If you're attending Reindustrialize this year (June 16-17), you'll have the chance to connect with Per Aspera’s own Dan Goldin. To request a meeting with the Big Dog, email [email protected].
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